The good in The Savages has, at this point, been well and duly noted elsewhere. Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney are utterly convincing as siblings Jon and Wendy Savage. Watching them together is certainly worth the price of admission. Tamara Jenkins' script is refreshingly authentic and low-key in its treatment of big issues ??? family, death ??? although it suffers from a few clunky moments where cheap laughs are bought at the expense of emotional insight. I was not, however, so blinded by the film's strengths that I was able to ignore otherwise sloppy craft behind the camera.
When Philip Bosco's Lenny Savage first appears on screen I was stunned to see a microphone bobbing around at the top of the frame. After my momentary surprise, I thought, ???Well, sometimes you just have to go with the best take for the performance, I guess.??? But, then it kept happening. At one point, you can even see the boom pole as it is positioned from the right of the screen.
I've tried to come up with some reason why this may have been intentional, and particularly so after learning that writer-director Tamara Jenkins has a few shorts and the perfectly respectable Slums of Beverly Hills (1998) to her credit.
The obvious possibility coming out of The Savages is that the appearance of the mic is a Brechtian device, intended to draw attention to the film as a film. However, if that is the reason, it does not seem to have worked very well. The audience at Salem Cinema seemed pretty well engaged with their emotions, and the keywords for critics appear to be ???naturalistic??? and ???emotionally real.??? I found the microphone to be more a distraction than a provocation. And while I'm no expert in theories of drama, I'm fairly certain that randomly dropping the mic into the frame in an otherwise realist film is not enough by itself to ???distance??? the audience from their emotional reactions to the characters and their stories.
In addition, the photography is best described as flat (it seemed very much like The Savages was shot on digital video, a medium which does tend to flatten an image if you don't work at creating a sense of depth or richness). There are a couple of nicely composed images, a moving overhead shot of Jon and Wendy napping on the same bed, a long shot of Wendy standing alone in front of a colorful theater storefront, but the film is knitted together by oddly framed and forgettable shots of the winter landscape. Perhaps these images are intended to prompt viewers to mediate on the end of life, but they're far too casually composed to achieve such an end.
Similarly, the editing is, strangely, both challenging and banal. At the beginning, risks are taken. One sequence, for example, cuts from Jon on the phone with Wendy to a plane in the air to Jon in an airport terminal without any information as to how he got there, if he's coming or going, or where he is. Typically, the audience would be provided visual and aural cues regarding those pieces of the narrative. Here the film invites a sense of disorientation and asks the audience to catch up without being fed information in a linear sequence. Eventually, though, the movie settles into a conventional rhythm, forgoing further demands on viewers.
Rough edges, in and of themselves, are not a problem for me. If they were, I could hardly teach and write about Canadian film and television as I do. I take great pleasure in seeing filmmakers play with and subvert conventional norms. But such choices are best made with intelligence and purpose, or at least verve. The Savages just looks and feels sloppy. The actors, and, ironically enough, Jenkins' own script, deserved better.
Post-Script:
On my home blog - link below - a friend and reader informed me that the mic issue was not a problem of the filmmakers, but the projectionist. I am somewhat embarassed that this possibility hadn't occurred to me, and now I feel a little bad for critiquing Tamara Jenkins' direction on this score. I do, however, stand by the basic argument of the review - the movie is not as thoughtfully made as it could or should have been. I would also add that, given the general lack of professional projectionists in the world, as a director I would hardly want to be at the mercy of the untrained seventeen year olds who staff local theaters. Aside from keeping mics and other equipment securely off camera, I understand that you can guide or force the hand of the projectionist by blacking out the "extraneous" area of the frame.
Originally posted on:
Short-Circuit Signs